Page 89 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day

The T'ang Dynasty, 618-906 a.d. o-

forerunners of the so-called " tiger-skin " porcelains of the seven-

—teenth and eighteenth centuries and the single colours already men-

tioned, instances have been identified on the principles already

indicated of wares with a full yellow glaze and a streaky, brownish

yellow. An interesting piece (Plate 8) in the Eumorfopoulos

Collection is covered with a deep violet blue glaze on a fine white

body. Others, again, have a dark chocolate brown glaze on a

reddish buff body, and a rare ewer in the British Museum is

distinguished by a deep olive brown glaze flecked with tea green,
which seems to anticipate by a thousand years the " tea dust "
glazes of the Ch'ien Lung period.^

Another variety of T'ang glaze, of which I have seen one
example, was an olive brown "^^^th large splashes of a light colour,
a greyish white, but with surface so frosted over by decay that

its original intention remained in doubt. One might say that this
was the father of the Japanese Takatori glazes with deep brown

under-colour and large patches of frothy white. We may men-

tion here three remarkable specimens found in a grave with a T'ang

mirror and described in 3Ian in 1901,- which are in the British
Museum. One is an oblate ovoid vase, with small neck and mouth,

of hard, light buff body, coated with a dull greenish black glaze

with minute specks of lighter colour. The others are tea bowls

of hard buff ware with dull brick-red glaze, not far removed in

colour from the Samian ware of Roman times. No exact Chinese

parallel has yet been found to these three pieces, though some-

thing approaching them is seen in certain bowls in the Eumorfo-

poulos collection which have a reddish brown glaze breaking into
black, being apparently of the type associated with the name of
Chien yao,^ and which are known in Japan as kaki temmoku. This

early kind of temmoku, which was probably made in Honan, has a

hard whitish body, and the glaze is sometimes flecked with tea green

as well as with golden brown. In some cases, too, a floral design or a

leaf has been impressed or stencilled on the black glaze and appears
in the brown or green colour (Plate 43, Fig. 1). It is said that a

somewhat similar brown temmoku ware was made in Corea as well.

^ Fragments of similarly glazed ware were discovered by Sir Aurel Stein on sites

in Turfan, which were supposed to be of Tang date (see p. 134).

* In a paper by Sir C. Hercules Read in the fifteenth number of Man, a publication

of the Anthropological Institute.

3 See p. 130.